St Pancras escorts in N1C and NW1, for arrivals under the Gothic clock

The upper concourse is the room worth knowing. Searcys runs a champagne bar the whole length of one platform edge, so guests waiting for a train and guests who have just left one sit at the same counter looking at the same ironwork. The arcade below holds the shops and the piano that anybody is allowed to play, which on a good evening is the best free performance between here and Bow Street.

Outside, the scale collapses quickly. Pancras Road runs down the eastern side in the shadow of the brickwork, Midland Road takes the western flank towards the British Library, and Somers Town begins a few streets behind that with its low blocks and its own quiet. The station is a destination; the streets around it are emphatically not, which is exactly why an arrival here goes unremarked.

The continental services set the pattern. Guests come in during the evening after a working day that started in another country, check in within three minutes of the platform, and would rather not eat alone at ten o'clock. Others are here the night before a morning departure and want the evening to end well without running late. A third group are visitors to the library or the concert halls nearby who simply prefer this end of town.

Four hours with dinner at £900 and ten hour nights at £1,800 lead the requests here, because both remove the need to watch a clock. Shorter bookings at £250 and £400 belong to the late arrivals who write from the train.

The St Pancras Renaissance occupies the old Midland Grand at the front of the station, and the grand staircase inside is worth ten minutes on its own, three flights of stone and gilt rising into a painted ceiling. Its Booking Office bar is the former ticket hall, with a very high roof and a very long counter. The Great Northern curves along Pancras Road a minute east. The Standard London faces the whole facade from across Euston Road, and the Pullman stands further west along the same road towards Euston.

Buildings, not affiliations. No agreement exists between the house and any hotel here, and she needs none: a companion crosses the lobby as your guest and goes up. Serviced flats on Midland Road and apartments in Somers Town are visited the same way.

King's Cross St Pancras, two minutes from the arrivals hall, carrying the continental and mainline services above and six Underground lines below: Circle, Hammersmith and City, Metropolitan, Northern, Piccadilly and Victoria. For a guest wheeling a case, the walk from the barrier to a hotel lobby in this postcode is shorter than the walk along the platform usually is.

Both postcodes sit in Zone 1, so the journey is inside the fee. The Piccadilly line reaches Heathrow from the same station, which matters when an evening ends at an airport rather than a bed.

Write with the time you expect to be in the room, how long you would like, the address, plus a name you have settled on or a sentence sketching the evening you picture. Trains are the one variable the desk plans around happily, so give the service rather than a guess. You will hear back in 10 to 15 minutes, at every hour of the night.

The desk checks the booking name, the house and the room once, then closes the subject. With that done, a hotel or residence evening is fixed on the sheet. Nights to morning, events and journeys follow the same path and are best raised before your train has left.

Most arrivals in this postcode happen inside the hour of confirmation, and a delay moves the hour rather than cancelling it.

20:30, the champagne bar along the platform edge, the correct first twenty minutes after any long journey and requiring no decisions at all. 21:00, down to the Booking Office under that enormous roof for a table and something unhurried. 22:30, a slow walk through the arcade and out along the front of the building to look at the brickwork properly, lit from below and better at night than in daylight. 23:00, upstairs, with the whole of the next day still ahead of you.

That is four hours at £900. Three hours at £700 keeps the bar and the table. For an arrival after eleven, an hour from £250 or ninety minutes at £400 is the usual ask, and ten hours at £1,800 answers an early departure completely.

No one on the list lives in N1C or NW1, so the names here travel in. Violetta is the tall one at 178 cm, black haired and sleek, and she carries a grand room like this one without any effort at all. Patricia comes over from Belgravia, auburn and composed, and is good company for a guest who has been talking all day. Karolina is fifteen minutes south in Covent Garden and follows the opera season closely, which pairs neatly with the concert halls on York Way.

The rest of the company reaches St Pancras on the same figures, with travel inside the fee from every home district.

The platforms share a roof line with Kings Cross and its rebuilt coal yards. Along Euston Road to the west, Euston takes the trains to the north west. South past the library, Bloomsbury starts at the first square, and the theatres of Covent Garden are about fifteen minutes on the Piccadilly line.